by Eli E. Hertz
Indeed, Jerusalem's importance in the Islamic world only appears evident when non-Muslims (including the Crusaders, the British, and the Jews) control or capture the city.
Despite
1,300 years of Muslim Arab rule, Jerusalem was never the capital of an
Arab entity. Oddly, the PLO's National Covenant, written in 1964, never
mentioned Jerusalem. Only after Israel regained control of the entire
city did the PLO "update" its Covenant to include Jerusalem.
Overall, the role of Jerusalem in Islam is best understood as the outcome of political pressure impacting on religious belief.
Mohammed, who founded Islam in 622 CE, was born and raised in
present-day Saudi Arabia; he never set foot in Jerusalem. His connection
to the city came years after his death when the Dome of the Rock shrine
and the al-Aqsa mosque were built in 688 and 691, respectively, their
construction spurred by political and religious rivalries. In 638 CE,
the Caliph (or successor to Mohammed) Omar and his invading armies
captured Jerusalem from the Byzantine Empire. One reason they wanted to
erect a holy structure in Jerusalem was to proclaim Islam's supremacy
over Christianity and its most important shrine, the Church of the Holy
Sepulcher.
More
important was the power struggle within Islam itself. The
Damascus-based Umayyad Caliphs who controlled Jerusalem wanted to
establish an alternative holy site if their rivals blocked access to
Mecca. That was important because the Hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca was
(and remains today) one of the Five Pillars of Islam. As a result, they
built what became known as the Dome of the Rock shrine and the adjacent
mosque.
To
enhance the prestige of the "substitute Mecca," the Jerusalem mosque
was named "al-Aqsa." It means "the furthest mosque" in Arabic, but has
far broader implications, since it is the same phrase used in a key
passage of the Quran called "The Night Journey." In that passage,
Mohammed arrives at "al-Aqsa" on a winged steed accompanied by the
Archangel Gabriel; from there they ascend into heaven for a divine
meeting with Allah, after which Mohammed returns to Mecca. Naming the
Jerusalem
mosque "al-Aqsa" was an attempt to say the Dome of the Rock was the very
spot from which Mohammed ascended to heaven, thus tying Jerusalem to
divine revelation in Islamic belief. The problem however is, that
Mohammed died in the year 632, nearly 50 years before the first construction of the "al-Aqsa" Mosque was completed.
Jerusalem
never replaced the importance of Mecca in the Islamic world. When the
Umayyad dynasty fell in 750, Jerusalem also fell into near obscurity for
350 years, until the Crusades. During those centuries, many Islamic
sites in Jerusalem fell into disrepair and in 1016 the Dome of the Rock
collapsed.
Still, for 1,300 years, various Islamic dynasties (Syrian, Egyptian, and
Turkish) continued to govern Jerusalem as part of their overall control
of the Land of Israel, disrupted only by the Crusaders. What is amazing
is that over that period, not one Islamic dynasty ever made Jerusalem
its capital. By the 19th century, Jerusalem had been so neglected by
Islamic rulers that several prominent Western writers who visited
Jerusalem were moved to write about it. French writer Gustav Flaubert,
for example, found "ruins everywhere" during his visit in 1850 when it
was part of the Turkish Empire (1516-1917). Seventeen years later Mark Twain wrote that Jerusalem had "become a pauper village."
Indeed,
Jerusalem's importance in the Islamic world only appears evident when
non-Muslims (including the Crusaders, the British, and the Jews) control
or capture the city. Only at those points in history did Islamic
leaders claim Jerusalem as their third most holy
city after Mecca and Medina. That was again the case in 1967, when
Israel captured Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem (and the Old City)
during the 1967 Six-Day War.
Eli E. Hertz
Source: http://www.mythsandfacts.org
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Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
1 comment:
I pray to God that Israel NEVER surrenders one inch of territory to the enemy. Followers of Islam have only one goal: erasing Israel from the face of the earth. But Israel was, is, and will always be the land promised to the Jewish people by God. I am Christian, but my religion was born out of Judaism, and all the holy sites in the land need to be protected, and only Israel can do that. Israel may stand alone, but it will survive when all else perishes.
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